The World Is My Classroom

A guided G Adventures tour of Vietnam, from South to North is what I'd booked. But things don't always go according to plan, and just as well. Spontaneity, I say, is the spice of life.

After partying all night into the early hours of the morning after arriving in Hue, I informed the guide that I was cancelling the rest of the tour, went down to the hotel lobby and booked a sleeper bus back to Hoi An to spend the rest of my time with the beautiful stranger I'd met there; an expat who'd left his real life in Canada to live the dream in Vietnam. Something about this disregard of the rules and disinterest in conforming to the norm had resonated with me, so I decided to do the same - if only for a week.

My days there were spent meeting and mixing with the locals and expats alike, enjoying a much more grass roots experience than that of being on a tour. For a brief moment in time, I felt what it was like to live there. I ate and drank where the locals did. I spent hours lying on one of the rustic beds placed on the white sand of An Bang beach for patrons of Banyan Beach Bar, in awe of the endless sea stretched out before me. I cruised around on the back of his motorbike, down the long, open road into the town, with fields of electric green on either side, the ocean a backdrop behind us. I felt the wind in my unruly hair and the feeling of freedom flowing through my veins.

Far removed from fast paced Western life, I lost all concept of time, lost in another world where you go with the flow, instead of against it. A place where opportunities are taken, and obligations are rejected. A place where there are no fixed plans but rather, when opportunity knocks, you rise to greet it. You take its hand and go.

As a traveller, each time you venture off, the future holds a promise of adventure. My advice to fellow travellers is not about how to replicate my trip; but rather how to make every trip an experience of your own.

The most profound lesson I learned in Vietnam, and my best advice to other adventurers regardless of destination, is this; remain open. Let intuition be your guide, follow your feelings, be brave. This guidance system, as opposed to that of the organised tour variety, may well lead you astray, but it will always see that you end up exactly where you need to be.